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new condo project causes consternation in snowdon

Author of the article:

Andy Riga

Publishing date:

December 21, 2010 • 3 minute read

Linda Griffiths, actor, playwright and pioneer of Canadian theatre died Sunday, at the age of 60. Griffiths is shown here in a 1980 photo from the play Maggie & Pierre. Photo courtesy of Theatre Passe Muraille./ Theatre Passe Muraille

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A group calling itself the Snowdon Committee this week set up a website and launched a petition against a plan to raze a block of Queen Mary Rd. near the Snowdon métro station to make way for condos and perhaps a new Pharmaprix and Subway restaurant.

From the Snowdon Committee’s petition:

The whole block of Queen Mary, east of the Snowdon metro station, is under the threat of disappearance. Only recently, it has been home to such locally famous establishments as the East European restaurant Ermitage, Greek restaurant Rodos, Japanese restaurant Queen Sushi, Haitian restaurant Toto Express, Subway diner, Clove Flower shop, French confectioner Aux plaisirs du Palais, a ladies wear store and a hair salon.

All their owners have received eviction notices because a certain Allprime Properties Inc. is planning to have the block demolished and to put up a condo building with Pharmaprix on its ground floor. Only the Subway will be given a lease in the projected construction.

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Instead of the neighbourhood with favourite restaurants residents will get a faceless structure built exclusively for profit. The city was planning to embellish Queen Mary Street to restore its traditional cozy look.

The project of the Allprime Properties Inc. (L’Aragon Queen Mary) will destroy those plans. Please sign the petition to the city authorities to urge them to prevent the destruction of the Queen Mary Street ethnic diversity.

This month, regular clinic patients received a letter telling them it would close Dec. 15; one of the doctors who worked out of the clinic is to relocate her practice in the new year. One of the clinic’s patients tells me the closure leaves a big gap in the area’s health services. The letter informed her she can fill out “an orphan form” at the local CLSC to be put on a waiting list to get a new family doctor.

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Pharmaprix spokesperson Lisa Gibson didn’t return my call this morning. I wanted to ask her about the two projects.

Pharmaprix is used to controversy in Montreal.

This is from a January 2008 article by Gazette colleague Michelle Lalonde about visual pollution:

Last February, the city of Montreal paid $220,000 in compensation to the owner of a building on St. Laurent Blvd. that houses a Pharmaprix drugstore.

Residents and heritage groups contended the city had not followed its own approval procedures when it allowed the store to erect what they considered a garish, strip-mall style facade on the historic Main. The Plateau Mont Royal borough withdrew the permit, but only after the work was done.

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The facade was ripped down and redone more modestly, but the building owner sued and won compensation.

Alex Norris, a Plateau resident who led the fight over the Pharmaprix facade, said Montrealers have to be vigilant about protecting their neighbourhoods from commercial development that ignores, or even shows contempt for, the context of its surroundings.

“I was furious that the city had approved this big, ugly, strip-mall style storefront right in the heart of one of our historic districts,” Norris said.

“These kinds of developments rip the soul out of neighbourhoods. They take a distinct neighbourhood with all its quirks and charms and turn it into Anywhere, U.S.A.” The uproar over Pharmaprix led the borough to rethink bylaws for approving renovations on commercial and residential buildings. The soul-searching culminated in a host of new rules, and borough mayor Helen Fotopulos said the exercise was valuable.

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